I recently got an opportunity to do some testing with a Dell Powerstore 5000T all-flash storage array, so I thought I would share some of the notes I made during my testing, for the benefit of any DBAs who might be using one to deliver ASM disks to their Oracle databases.
This will be part of a series of posts that focus on the management of Oracle and ASM with Powerstore, so consider this post as a foundational topic. Nothing especially earth shattering, but some solid points nonetheless.
On this blog and elsewhere you will find UDEV rules examples for setting device ownership and naming consistency on older versions of Linux.
With RHEL7 some of the syntax has changed slightly.
This example was created using OEL7 with the Red Hat kernel, but should also work on Red Hat and CentOS.
The KFOD tool is an Oracle supplied command line tool for inspecting available disks.
Since many of the issues associated with failed RAC installs are caused by shared disk, using KFOD to ensure that ASMLib or UDEV has correctly presented disks with the correct permissions to all nodes, before launching the Grid installer can save a good deal of time and effort.
However, since it is the Grid installer that installs KFOD, this can be tricky.
In this post we show how to leverage KFOD before the Grid Infrastructure is installed:
In this blog post, we are going to install Oracle 11.2.0.3 64-bit on CentOS 6.3 using VMware Workstation 8. Given that Oracle no longer offers ASMLib for non Oracle branded Linux, we are going to use UDEV rules to manage the disk presentation to ASM.
In my 10-part post on installing Oracle RAC on VMware Workstation I deliberately used an excessive number of screen shots to guide readers through the process. This time I am going to assume you are already comfortable with the Oracle GUI installers, and will skip over excess details to condense this down into a single blog post.
You may find the scsi_id command returns a null result in CentOS 6 or RHEL 6 on VMware.
[root@localhost ~]# scsi_id -g -u -d /dev/sdb [root@localhost ~]#
The problem here is that VMware Workstation does not provide unique SCSI identifiers to the virtual SCSI devices. We need to modify the VMX file to make this happen by adding the following directive:
disk.EnableUUID = "TRUE"
Restart the VM and now the scsi_id command should work:
[root@localhost ~]# scsi_id -g -u -d /dev/sdb 36000c2980c56d98cc5150a0ac103058d
the gruffdba 